These days, you can find Shel Myeroff creating rustic hardwood furniture—including one-of-a-kind tables that fetch up to $13,000 each—from Chagrin Valley Custom Furniture, his shop in Warrensville Heights, Ohio. But this wasn’t always the case.
Back in the late ’90s, Myeroff was the CEO of a corporate recruiting agency he had founded with partners in the previous decade. One day, while browsing in a store that sold woodworking machinery, Myeroff was struck by inspiration. He returned to the store the next day and dropped $4,000 on furniture-making tools and supplies, including a table saw.
“I started making projects that day and didn’t stop,” says Myeroff, who’s now 65. “I found it therapeutic.” At first, Myeroff designed and built furniture in his garage—and later in a basement workshop—just for family and friends. All the while, he continued to lead his business, a firm that places sales and marketing executives with high-tech companies.
But by 2013, Myeroff was done. He sold his stake in the firm to his business partners. Not long after, he officially launched Chagrin Valley Custom Furniture.
The Secret Ingredient
Selling his portion of the company he had started decades earlier left Myeroff with a comfortable nest egg for himself and his wife, Adria. He invested the money in tax-advantaged savings accounts and mutual funds, but he also used it as cash flow to get his new venture off the ground. Myeroff’s advice to anyone starting a new business? “You can’t do it without a good banker,” he says. “They gave me the tools to do things I needed to do.”
In addition to establishing a line of low-interest credit with a bank, he set up a money market account for writing checks when he needed to make purchases both small and large, such as a $40,000 spray booth for applying finishes to his wares. His bank also arranged for him to conduct sales through ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfers, which means the business can receive payments directly from his customer’s checking accounts. That way, Myeroff avoids paying credit card fees.
In 2017, in order to take Chagrin Valley Custom Furniture to the next level, Myeroff moved the business from his basement workshop to a new 3,600-square-foot shop and showroom and purchased a variety of saws, routers and other new woodworking tools. He now has four full-time employees and one part-timer to help create his designs, which are often made of walnut, maple and other wood reclaimed from old barns. The company specializes in “live edge” tables, which take the shape of a tree trunk’s natural contours, and “river pour” designs, in which Myeroff and his team use epoxy resin to create the illusion of a waterway coursing across the length of a tabletop.
What the Future Holds
Myeroff concedes that the transition from corporate CEO to furniture maker hasn’t always been easy. Moving to a bigger work space, buying new equipment and hiring staff left him $200,000 in debt. And getting clients to pay up is an occasional cause of headaches. “Sometimes, you ask yourself, why am I doing this?” says Myeroff. “But getting beat up now and then gets outweighed by the great victories you experience.”
One recent victory was a $20,000 order for seven river pour tables from a Las Vegas restaurant. Myeroff is also in discussion with a famous musician (whom he discreetly refuses to name) about creating a custom table. “That would be cool,” Myeroff says.
It took three years, but the company is out of the red and now turns a profit. Myeroff is looking a few years down the road with an eye toward stepping down from his role as president of the company. When that time comes, he’ll hand the reins to his partner, Zach Schulte, the VP of operations and shop foreman. “He’s like a son to me,” says Myeroff. “He’s a great protégé and he’s learning everything really fast.”
Just don’t mention the word “retirement” around Myeroff. When asked if he plans to stick around the shop and continue creating unique, handcrafted wooden furniture, Myeroff was unambiguous. “Of course!” he said. “I do this because I love it.”
Timothy Gower is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in more than two dozen major magazines and newspapers, including Prevention, Reader’s Digest, Esquire, Men’s Health and The New York Times.
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